


Chocolate Chip

by mediocre_kazoo_player



Category: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Alternate Universe - All Girls' School, Bullying, F/F, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-12
Updated: 2018-01-13
Packaged: 2019-03-03 18:43:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13347225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mediocre_kazoo_player/pseuds/mediocre_kazoo_player
Summary: Kibougamine Girls' Academy has a drama club, and it's a hot mess. When an oblivious Saihara is sucked into its greedy maw, her knight in sequined armor is the person everyone least expects it to be.





	1. Chapter 1

_Monday. Sunny._

Peep peep diddly doo. Doo dee doo dee peep peep diddly.

"So what I'm saying is—" Akamatsu is driving the ice cream truck. A tinny song blares, _peep peep diddly doo,_ from two-bit speakers meant for the innards of a Toys R Us stocking stuffer, over and between her words as she gestures idly with her hands. "We need to geigermuffer the ischkenbuscher before they can splukge. Does that make sense?"

It makes complete sense. Saihara fiddles with the brim of her hat. "Yeah, but..."

Akamatsu looks at her sympathetically. "I know. It's not easy." _Doo dee doo_. She lays a firm, reassuring hand on Saihara's shoulder. Saihara doesn't bother to ask how she could possibly be doing that from the window of the towering ice cream truck when Saihara is standing down here and looking up at Akamatsu, who certainly doesn't have arms that are five feet long.

"I-It's not that," Saihara mutters. "It's—we need—we need isopropyl." Dimly, she wonders if she meant isopropanol.

"It's too late for that," Akamatsu says softly, remorsefully. Her knuckles are skeleton-white against the big black steering wheel of the ice cream truck. _Peep peep diddly_. "Do you hear that? They're here."

Saihara hears it. A large swarm of bees has gathered near the rear of the truck and is threatening to envelop the two of them as well, at the rate it's moving. _Peep peep diddly bzzzzzzt. Doo dee doo bzzzzzzzt._

"Shouko-chan! Grab my hand!"

"I can't! We don't have the isopropanol!"

"It doesn't matter!"

_Peep peep diddly doo._

Unseeing and unfeeling, Saihara swats her phone off of the nightstand. It's undeterred by the way its plastic casing thuds against the rug and continues to sing _peep peep diddly doo_ while vibrating. Saihara groans something about isopropyl, forcibly peeling her eyes open.

It's as bright as afternoon out there. That's the thing about springtime. She silently resents her sheer curtains for about five seconds as her eyeballs ache with the effort of readjusting.

"Shut up," she grumbles under her breath. The comforters rustle and the right side of the mattress dips in a gentle V-shape.

 _Peep bzzzzzt diddly_ —

The V becomes a U as Saihara flops backwards onto the bed again, holding her phone parallel to the ceiling. Its blank screen reflects her sleep-encrusted eyes and the greasy shine on her nose and mouth courtesy of the blazing windowpanes.

"Happy peep peep diddly first day of school," she says to absolutely no one.

* * *

The one clump of hair won't go down no matter what so Saihara says fuck it and plops her old baseball cap over it, squashing it flat. First casualty of the day. Now she's in front of the open fridge but she might as well be back under the ice cream truck screaming crazy about isopropanol as a bunch of bees fly around her because her brain feels like a thick sludge.

WHOLE MILK, the carton in front of her shouts.

Eh. Not feeling it. She jerks her head towards the pantry, where her alternative sits at eye level on a wire rack.

SOY MILK, all six boxes under the plastic wrapper shout at her in unison.

But if she gets milk, she can put cereal in it.

WHOLE MILK.

She doesn't feel like eating cereal.

SOY MILK.

Alright.

The fridge door closes with a suction-fueled _thhp_ as Saihara pops the cellophane covering open with a fingernail. The static makes it cling to a box of soy milk as she abducts it from its sextuplet siblings and stabs a straw into its brain. Second casualty of the day, she muses, taking a sweet soymilky sip of its contents.

The creamy whitish color of the soy milk coming up through the straw reminds her of Akamatsu. As much as she pretends not to notice it, there's a couple spots on Akamatsu's thighs that never escape the shade of her uniform and thus remain as pale as they were the day she was born. A tiny naggy voice pops up in Saihara's head. _She has a boyfriend_ , it chastises her. Touché. Saihara bites the straw.

She doesn't remember what Akamatsu's boyfriend looks like. All she knows is that the year Akamatsu transferred to a new district and Saihara stayed behind, there had been some fateful piano recital where she'd met some guy who'd swept her off her feet over the course of three measly months. Oh, there was photographic evidence. Some big oaf in a black suit with ears that looked more at home on a sailboat with his big oaf arm slung around Akamatsu's shoulder, yeah. Okay, maybe he was kind of cute. Big deal.

The drink gurgles. Saihara deposits the squashed box in the trashcan along with a chewed-up straw.

It's fine now. Because of some lucky break involving her parents and her uncle, she's going to the same school as Akamatsu again. She flicks her phone's screen on, then off. Their reunion's in a few minutes.

* * *

Akamatsu is waiting for her at the end of the street. She opens her arms, and Saihara starts running.

* * *

"And yeah. It's a pretty small school, but I think you'll like it." They pass by a restaurant and the greasy scent comes rising up through the spring air around them. The hiss of oil on a hot frying pan goes crescendo, decrescendo as Akamatsu's blue skirt swishes around her legs. The big oaf lumbers through Saihara's head again as she pries her eyes away from the negative space between Akamatsu's pristine thighs.

"Heh, I hope so."

The words _out of my league_ bounce around in her peripheral vision. Akamatsu Kaede is a social butterfly. When she speaks there's no extra breath in her voice—she uses up all of the air she takes in with this unwavering melodious tone that does not feel like vibrations in a medium but rather something that you can reach out and grab ahold of. She's built all solid-like, too, with a nice hourglass figure and a generous helping of cleavage that makes her uniform bunch up in places.

Akamatsu's the kind of girl who looks and feels so solid that Saihara wonders if being by her side with her waifish looks and hesitating mumble will make her blow away into the wind. She's wondered that before. She gives up trying to figure out which way her jealousy tugs.

* * *

Kibougamine Girls' Academy. Also known as "the school Enoshima Junko goes to".

"It's kind of annoying, actually," Akamatsu laughs. "Like, whenever the media men show up, the whole school suddenly revolves around her."

Saihara subconsciously scans the hallway for Enoshima.

"Don't worry," Akamatsu says, her social acumen as sharp as ever, "She's usually not around here since she's an upperclassman. If you wanna see her, though, drop by the drama club." She gestures somewhere, realizes that the classroom she has in mind isn't visible from here, and lets her hand fall limp. "They're like a cult or something! Seriously. All Thespians hail to the Drama Queen," she imitates, waggling her fingers.

Saihara giggles at that. "Who knows, maybe I'll go visit the wildlife sometime this week."

* * *

"Look—Hey! Akamatsu-san!" The first exclamation is quickly joined by a chorus of Akamatsu, Akamatsu, Akamatsu. Akamatsu is led giggling into the classroom by an arm around her shoulder. There's somewhere between ten and twenty of them packed into this whitewashed box with the canvas curtains rolled up to let the greenish yellowish whitish April glare in, conversing idly and welcoming each other back.

Saihara stands in the doorway like a fish out of water. Thankfully, Akamatsu decides to give her the same generous treatment she herself has received and all but scoops her into the box along with the rest. The curious heads of somewhere between ten and twenty teenage girls swivel towards the reluctant dog being prodded into the yard with a friendly uniform-clad arm.

Sit, Akamatsu makes her sit. Saihara's knees buckle with a wooden squeak as she sinks into a standard-issue school desk. There's a collective mumble like the chatter of ocean waves as the class rearranges itself around the new arrival. "So you're Saihara Shouko?"

A wheel pops up in her head and a bunch of different possible responses start squeezing their way onto different sections of the wheel, all the while rotating about its axis with a rickety click-click-click-click. "Ah—I—Mm—How—Yeah," she vocalizes, cycling through about half of her choices in a single breath. Her stomach drops out of her and her heart starts to protest against this forceful ejection with its insistent thudding.

They are merciful to her and start laughing without malice, as if observing a child attempting to walk for the first time, holding their ten to twenty hands out to steady its wobbly gait if need be. The one who posed the question offers her hand first to the unsteady child before her. "Akamatsu-san has told us a lot about you," she says. "Amami Ranri. Nice to meet you."

Saihara takes the hand. "N-nice to meet you too." She gives it a firm shake, or at least tries to—the arch of Amami's perfectly groomed eyebrows indicates that in her determination to prove that she's back on her feet, she has given it a tad bit too much gusto.

Lucky for her, Amami is laid back. Amami withdraws her hand with a low chuckle, shaking it out and letting her jewelry clink rhythmically against itself as she does so. "Hell of a handshake." Saihara blushes.

As the interest in the new girl dies down, the class clumps into smaller groups, some working their way around the creaky relics made in the shape of desks and others propping themselves up against the far wall. The three who seem closest to Akamatsu linger. Amami Ranri from earlier kneels with her arms propped up on Saihara's desk. Momota Yuu introduces herself and flits this way and that, seemingly unable to find a comfortable position to stay in. Harukawa Maki sits down and probably doesn't even blink. It's a little unnerving.

A ways into the conversation, Saihara feels herself slipping out of their dialogue and Akamatsu handling everything instead. That's to be expected, she guesses, but that doesn't mean she isn't...

The word pulses at the back of her head but remains mired there. She takes out her phone.

Momota's erratic repositioning centers itself on Harukawa. _Harumaki_ is her nickname of choice. Whether Harukawa appreciates this or not Saihara can't tell.

Between playing with the different tabs on her phone that she's not actually paying any meaningful attention to and offering negligible input to the conversation she's also not paying any meaningful attention to, Saihara gets her gaze caught on the east corner of the classroom.

Someone has escaped the social clusters and is sitting available back there, her thin, pale hands folded in front of her.

A quick jolt of awful, schadenfreudistic relief creeps up Saihara's spine. A fellow social reject? She pictures herself sliding into the seat next to this loner and striking up a conversation with a voice that uses up all of the air she breathes in.

The loner looks her part. Her uniform is several sizes too big for her. Instead of bunching about her breasts like Akamatsu's, it pools around the crooks of her elbows and drags on the seat. There are no breasts to speak of. She's got one of those faces with the nose and mouth tight together, like twenty different baby animals that flash through Saihara's mind. A fawn. That's the one she settles on, getting a glimpse at the lone girl's wide doe eyes.

As the girl shifts gently, one of the great white clouds out there must have noticed Saihara's curiosity and made way for the sunlight to come streaming down behind her profile. The tips of her hair, bunched together in poor excuses for pigtails, look slightly purple in this light. It's particularly noticeable in the little pieces sticking almost perpendicularly out from between the hair ties. The cherry on top is the big red patch on one of her knees with a loudly colored band-aid slapped haphazardly over the worst of it.

Saihara almost excuses herself from Akamatsu's flock and offers herself to this tiny fawn. She almost does. But Bambi gets tired of ogling the nicks in the rubber edge of her desk, turns about in her chair, and stares directly into Saihara's eyes.

She smiles sweetly.

Saihara's knees don't feel functional. She lets her mouth tremble into a reciprocal smile, then drops her gaze and huddles close to her phone like it's a security blanket.


	2. Chapter 2

_Wednesday. Sunny._

The bottoms of Saihara's shoes squeak on the school's linoleum checkerboard flooring. Akamatsu latches onto her backpack, making her skid and wobble. "Whoa, hold on," says Akamatsu. "What are you in a hurry for? You've left your zipper open."

"O-oh," Saihara laughs. She lets Akamatsu stuff the tube of homework assignments she's amassed today into her backpack and zip it closed. "I guess I didn't want to make you wait."

Akamatsu claps her on the back, grinning. "Silly! I'm not going home today." She waits for Saihara to ask her why.

"Why?" Saihara asks.

"Drama club," she chirps.

Saihara's mouth forms a little pink O and she glances to the side, considering her options. Perhaps it wouldn't be too brash to tag along? "Well...since you told me about it and all, can I come see?"

Akamatsu's luminous smile manages to still brighten by a few watts. "How could I say no?"

* * *

 Akamatsu is the drama club's indispensable piano accompaniment. There are a few other girls fooling around on the piano when she arrives, but they scatter like rodents at the sight of a true master striding solidly towards them. Her knees knocking against the edge of the piano bench, Akamatsu relinquishes her backpack to draw out an impeccable black folder containing neatly stacked music sheets. Saihara glances somewhat abashedly at where her homework wad tents the fabric of her own bag.

"That's about all of them," Akamatsu sighs happily. "Well, you'll sing along, right?"

"H-Huh?"

Akamatsu indicates the sheet music eagerly. "They're pop songs! I know a bunch more by heart. You'll do it, right?"

Saihara looks into her wide eyes and dimpled cheeks and the "no thanks" crawls back down her throat.

She's grateful that Akamatsu sings along, covering up her own quivering voice decently enough that sometimes she can flap her lips in the shape of syllables until Akamatsu notices and butts her head against Saihara's arm. Some other girls, apparently familiar with Akamatsu (no surprise there), join in, and soon Saihara does not have to flap her lips at all.

After the last note of a cheery tune, Akamatsu squeezes backwards through the throng of giggling girls choosing their next song from the lineup of sheet music and slides behind Saihara like an apparition.

"Ah!" Saihara bristles at the hand on her shoulder.

"Boo," Akamatsu sings.

"Oh, it's you. What do you want?"

"Are you gonna stick around till the meeting starts?"

"My—my house isn't too far. My uncle's probably not going to be home until late, so there's no reason I can't."

"But are you gonna?"

"...Yeah."

Akamatsu cheers and sits down on one of the auditorium chairs. "I can't wait for you to meet everyone."

Saihara falls naturally into place beside her. "Who's that? She's in our homeroom, right?" She indicates a girl sporting wild hair like dried squid and an astoundingly narrow chin.

Akamatsu begins to explain. That's Iruma Miu over there, the one who knows what hairspray and curling irons are but perhaps decided to play by ear when she first started using them. She does the most work on our props and sets. Iruma's uniform is buttoned all funny so that it squashes her breasts together and lets the amplified cleavage peek out of the top of her shirt.

That cleavage is dangling dangerously close to someone else, pallid as a ghost, apparently Iruma's set assistant who doubles as an AV girl. Iidabashi Kibou, that's her name. Iruma leaps on her and the flush rife on her face begins to show through the roots of her diaphanous white hair.

There's Saionji, Tsumiki, and Mioda in a cluster over there around the piano. Tsumiki is stuttering, shaking, disappearing behind Saionji's giant hair. Mioda is rolling her eyes.

Scattered around the stage area is a motley crew. Oh—Kibougamine writes its own plays sometimes, Akamatsu forgot to mention. Greasy Fukawa and big sweaty Yamada take the brunt of that workload. They also appear pretty constantly as chorus characters in the summer musical.

That's Yasuhiro. Close friend of Yamada's or something. Never clear what their relationship actually is—might be abusive. She's one of the actresses and seems to be perpetually in costume. Right now, she's engrossed in a conversation with Shirogane, who keeps picking at the split ends on Yasuhiro's wig. Saihara recognizes her from homeroom too. Shirogane's in charge of costumes, which explains her current preoccupations.

Hagakure...huh? Akamatsu pauses, laughs. She's not sure if Hagakure is actually part of drama club or not.

Saihara stops laughing along for a moment only to catch a glimpse of a tiny figure stepping nimbly out from behind the curtains and just as inconspicuously slipping back behind them. It clicks. The lone ranger from homeroom! She's in drama club? Maybe she's part of the script-writing committee?

"That's Ouma," Akamatsu says quickly, and starts to recount a funny story about Tsumiki and Saionji.

 _Ouma who? What is she doing here? Does she talk? Who put such a grand name on such a small girl?_ Saihara takes all of her questions, sticks them on the back of a fake grin, and glues it onto her face. It'll come off as easy as a post-it note, sure, but it works for now. She laughs at Akamatsu's punchline a little early.

One after another, Amami, Momota, and Harukawa make their way into the auditorium. They find Akamatsu immediately and shoot Saihara a cordial greeting.

"We just bum around," Amami says upon inquiry, scratching the back of her head.

"That's not true! You're all very talented actresses," Akamatsu pipes up.

"Aw, Kaede," Momota laughs.

A second trio files in through the door, but this time it's different. Bodies tense like marionettes, swaying as though their strings have been stilled abruptly. A wave of silence sweeps through the room; the few at the back who realize belatedly that the yawning auditorium is stock-still save for them blush red like tomatoes and sink into a guilty quietude.

The thespians are bowing before their queen.

The goddess Enoshima enters flanked by an Ikusaba and a Maizono. Maizono comes in treading lightly, one foot in front of the other, as if she'll fall off of an invisible balance beam with any one misstep. It's cute. Everything about her is deliberately cute, from how she holds her fingers all curled up down to the way she wrinkles her nose slightly because it'll look smaller that way. Her peach-pink lips are pressed together and curved parabolically upwards to yield the mathematical optimum for cute, cute, cute.

Ikusaba doesn't bother. Had she been offered a more merciful juxtaposition, she would have come off as "handsome" at the very least. But she's standing next to Maizono and Enoshima. Her step comes down a little too heavy and she refuses to pinch her lips together, so they hang there loosely, doing nothing to complement her uninterested gray eyes. Saihara gets the faint impression that she might be the muscle of the trio.

And then there's Enoshima.

Queen Enoshima, Goddess Enoshima, Enoshima Junko who has an army of _Junko Junkies_ at her beck and call, comes in hot on her high-heeled boots like she owns the campus, every country club within a hundred-mile radius, and the municipal water supply. Every facial muscle she has is drawn in such a way that it is completely impossible to take a picture of her in which she is not dazzlingly photogenic. Iruma's boob boost is as pathetic as crumpled tissues compared to the firm curve of Enoshima's breasts and the tiniest trace of a lacy black bra playing peekaboo with her collar. And her hair, oh, her hair. The equations that describe Enoshima's curls are classified corporate property.

Enoshima shifts her weight to one leg. Her skirt doesn't clear mid-thigh by a long shot. The air in the auditorium has frozen, and Saihara realizes why: Enoshima's glossy, picture-perfect lips have parted by a millimeter.

It's a tease. She blows a perfectly spherical pink bubble from a wad of gum nobody realized she was chewing half a second before. It grows, bigger, bigger, bigger...

It pops. Every girl in the auditorium must have jumped, because there's a soft rustling of skirts yet not a single murmur because Queen Enoshima has yet to place her decree.

Enoshima shifts her weight to the other leg, flicks her tongue out, and fishes the remains of the late bubble back into her perfect mouth. In a heart-stopping moment, she catches Saihara's eye and winks. Saihara's breath stutters out over her bottom lip all at once.

"Everyone," Enoshima cries regally, and everyone looks up at her, compass needles pointing to the North Pole of planet Thespis. "I know we're not in our tip top conditions because we're coming out of our vacation, but we have a busy semester ahead of us, alright? So,"

She strides across the room, body aligned with the proscenium, footfalls echoing as if the land underneath her feet did not exist until she stepped upon it. "Sensei and I have come up with a tentative plan for the summer musical. Since Sensei won't be here until our third meeting, I guess I'll have to explain it! Listen closely, okay?" Ikusaba and Maizono remain in their places, their hands folded in front of each other at the exact same angles.

Enoshima surveys her devotees. Approving of their undivided attention, she continues. "We will release the musical by the third meeting, when Sensei comes back. You'll have one week of downtime. The fifth meeting will be auditions."

Yeugh. Akamatsu has to deal with this? Saihara spares a look at Akamatsu, whose solemn face is still angled towards Enoshima like a sunflower towards the sun.

"Sensei will probably explain this again when she's back, but it wouldn't hurt all your cute little noggins to know. Our auditions..."

Saihara scans the rest of the girls, who are similarly enraptured, except for—

Ouma is checking her nails.

 _Ouma is checking her fucking fingernails while Queen Enoshima is speaking_.

A stream of indignant thoughts pop up in Saihara's brain— _how insolent how could she how disrespectful who does she think she is_ —but the second Ouma raises her head and looks at her again with those innocent doe eyes, Enoshima's spell is broken. Saihara is left instead with a sort of incredulous fascination at this mousy, pale girl and her lopsided pigtails. And her scratched-up leg. Monday's band-aid was red and yellow; today's is blue and purple. It covers up the scratch a little more neatly, as if Ouma might have woken up at six-thirty today instead of seven, giving her an extra half hour to stick it on her knee.

"...Hey newbie, did you catch that?" Momota's finger jabs into Saihara's arm and she yelps. She looks over questioningly at Momota, who is sweating bullets. "Er...?"

Another finger taps her very lightly on the head. Saihara turns.

Enoshima is standing right in front of her. "AH," she says, everything and nothing rising up to her throat but not daring to leave it.

Enoshima's lip gloss is laid on far too thick.

"If you're planning to audition, then put your name down on the sign-up sheet. Just so we can get an estimate of how many people we have," she says cheerily, booping a flustered Saihara gently on the head again. "Rest of the meeting's free time! Get to know everyone, okay?"

"A-ah, okay," Saihara wheezes.

Enoshima smiles, walking back over to Ikusaba and Maizono with a skip in her step. Saihara absolutely notices it when she reaches down quickly and wipes a finger off on her skirt.

* * *

 There is not a single tense muscle in Amami's body. That's just how she moves, low and languid, the fine pinstripes of her (perhaps illegal by the Kibougamine dress code) undershirt rumpled to form the peaks and troughs of an illusory current. _Current_ is also what Saihara would use to describe her speech.

"Mmm, yeah, least year was a doozy [trough]. I mean [peak], I'm not saying Yamada can't act [trough]." Amami's river current drops erratically into a long, smooth trough. "But I'm saying Yamada can't act."

The owners of the five forearms arranged in a faintly floral formation over the backs of the auditorium seats share a chuckle.

"Dumbass, she's standing right over there," Momota whispers coarsely.

"I'll deal," Amami says, still chuckling.

 _Over there_ is also where Ouma's slender figure perches atop an auditorium chair that hasn't unfolded yet. Her pale fawn legs dangle over the edge of the unopened seat, the tips of her toes barely kissing the floor.

"Hey," Saihara says, fumbling. The other four lend her the conversational reins affably. "That—That girl over there hasn't said a word the whole time she's been here. I feel kinda bad looking at her."

Four of the forearms withdraw. Akamatsu looks about ready to tell another funny story about Tsumiki and Saionji.

"Ouma Sachiko," Harukawa finally pronounces, spitting the name out like any other person might say _cockroach_ , "is not worth anyone's pity."

"Hey," Momota says, patting Harukawa on the shoulder. "She's just...hard to deal with."

Amami makes a face.

"Are you sure—" Saihara remembers mid-sentence to put her eyebrows back where they belong.

Momota's voice slips back into the ten-inch-radius whisper she used on Yamada earlier. " _If you talk to her too much you'll get herpes._ "

And Saihara's eyebrows escape. "H-Huh? How does that..."

Momota's head jerks forwards unnaturally. "Ow!"

Harukawa withdraws her hand, face set in an incredibly neutral expression. "You won't. Everyone will think you did."

Akamatsu sighs. "Look, she's difficult, but I'm sure she's a good person on the inside. She just has a lot of trouble expressing hersel—"

This time, Amami interjects, the peaks and troughs in her voice suspiciously shallow. "Akamatsu-san, you weren't here for most of middle school. I can't tell how much she's really changed from back then since she doesn't open her mouth too often anymore, but by god, when she does, nobody's reputation is safe."

Akamatsu's jaw shuts with a little click. "...Mm."

It's in this way that Saihara learns the scandalous secret lying behind that bright, neotenous, can-do-no-wrong face.

Ouma Sachiko is not alone because she is unloved. She's alone because she is hated.


End file.
